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Cerabino: With no A.G. Holley, maybe Publix can remodel a store into a TB hospital

Cerabino: With no A.G. Holley, maybe Publix can remodel a store into a TB hospital

It’s really not all that surprising that Florida shut down its only tuberculosis hospital during the worst TB outbreak the nation has seen in the past 20 years.

A.G. Holley State Hospital in Lantana was, after all, a public institution, and thereby worthy of the sharpest sort of haphazard fiscal scrutiny. And so the state health department didn’t even think it necessary to point out the TB outbreak to state legislators as they axed the hospital in March.

As the state’s deputy health secretary put it, this was basically just an epidemic among homeless men in the Jacksonville area. No reason to inform the general public.

But epidemics have a way of spreading to more politically relevant sectors, and some of the infected ended up in an assisted-living facility, places providing services for the homeless and a jail. So far, the outbreak is still relatively small, causing 13 deaths, and 99 illnesses, including six infected children.

But there’s still the matter of what do to with the infected. Especially if the numbers grow.

The state’s solution, so far, has been to put some of the TB patients in motels where nurses can look in on them.

Outsourcing TB beds to the private sector! Another reason to be proud of our pro-business state.

What could possibly go wrong with that arrangement?

The financial arrangement isn’t that rosy, either. It appears that it costs about $11 million a year to stash TB patients around the state, which would have been the cost to continue to operate the TB hospital in Lantana.

If only there was a way to fix this. Well maybe there is.

Turn a Publix supermarket into a TB hospital. Let me explain.

Last year, state legislators did Publix and a small number of other huge Florida companies a big favor. In the guise of bringing new business in the state, legislators amended the state’s corporate tax code to change the formula in which the largest of corporations doing business in the state are charged.

Instead of paying corporate taxes based on a formula that considers payroll, property taxes and sales, the new law allowed some corporations to only pay taxes on their sales. The idea was that by just taxing sales, there wouldn’t be any adverse consequences for businesses to add property or payroll in the state.

“Consequently, it may encourage corporations to expand operations in a given state, or to consider that when deciding where to locate operations,” the staff analysis of the legislation read.

To be eligible for this reduction in corporate tax, the company had to pledge to spend $250 million on capital projects in Florida over a two-year period.

No sweat. Big companies such as FPL, CSX railway and Publix were already planning to spend at least that much in the normal operation of their business.

So what has happened isn’t a flood of new big business in Florida, but a big tax break for existing companies to make the capital improvements they were already planning to make before this law went into effect.

Publix, a company that made $1.5 billion profit last year, is getting a tax break to build and remodel stores and warehouses it was already planning to do.

Or to look at it another way, taxpayers are paying to remodel Publix supermarkets.

So I figure, maybe it’s time for legislators to be as miserly with Publix as they were with the state’s only TB hospital.

As long as we’re paying a private company to remodel its stores, maybe they’ll remodel one into a TB hospital for us.